Hawthorne. The Hawthorne Club was a nightclub, a bowling alley, a boxing arena and a community gathering spot for decades.

Located on the west side of Hawthorne Boulevard at 126th Street, near the current City Hall, the building was constructed in the late 1920s.

The cavernous club hosted all kinds of events, including bowling competitions, boxing exhibitions and dance marathons in the 1920s and ’30s.

Legendary athlete Jim Thorpe was a regular who frequently impressed clubgoers with his bowling prowess.

In the late 1930s, the Hawthorne Club opened a poker parlor, but the operation was closed after a November 1938 raid aimed at shutting down public draw poker games.

The Hawthorne Club continued to host civic and recreational activities until the late 1950s, when the Northrop Corp. bought it for use as an employee recreational facility. It was torn down in 1962 and replaced by office and retail buildings.

Sam Gnerre has worked for the Daily Breeze in Torrance since 1984. He grew up in Fontana, Calif., and is a graduate of Fontana High School. He earned a B.A. in English literature from the University of California, Riverside, and a Master's degree in library science from UCLA. He was hired at the Daily Breeze in 1984 to help with the conversion of the paper's manual clip file system to an online database of archived stories. Currently, he writes the paper's weekly News Quiz, does a weekly music CD review, and researches and writes local history articles for the South Bay History blog, in addition to his current duties as a night website editor for the Southern California News Group.

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